~ Irish Families in Victorian Stafford

Malieu or Malia

Augustus Malieu or Malia (various spellings) was born around 1821 in Co. Mayo. He arrived in Stafford in the 1850s and worked as a farm labourer. In 1857 he married Catherine Gray, a Dublin-born woman who took in washing. They had two daughters, Mary (b. 1859) and Sarah (b. 1860). Both married English men and although Sarah seems to have subsequently moved away, Mary’s marriage to a local shoemaker, George Hill, established a family line that continued in Stafford into the twentieth century.

Augustus and Catherine Malieu were always poor but they lived quiet lives in Clarke’s Court. Augustus died in the Workhouse in 1879 but Catherine (Kate) outlived him by over 20 years. Even so, by the 1900s she had been abandoned as a pauper in the Workhouse; she died there in 1905. Her daughters and sons-in-law had clearly not taken her in.